Amusing Planet

Just after 5 o’clock on the morning of 11 November 1918, British, French, and German officials gathered in a railway carriage in the Compièg...

Before the age of steam, all early submarines relied on human muscle for propulsion. The first functional submarine, built by Dutch inventor...

A Roman-era latrine in Timgad in Algeria . Credit: Wikimedia Commons Throughout history, governments have found creative ways to raise...

Camouflage is a vital strategy in warfare—whether on land, at sea, or in the air. During the First and Second World Wars, many Allied ships—...

In the glittering world of 19th-century theatre, where talent was prized and ridicule could end a career, one man defied convention and beca...

Gottfried "Götz" von Berlichingen was no ordinary knight. A formidable figure in 16th-century Germany, he earned both fame and in...

In the late 19th century, a rare and highly unusual neuropsychiatric condition was observed among a group of French-Canadian lumberjacks li...

By the late 19th century, the North Pole remained one of the last great geographic mysteries. The quest to reach the inhospitable and danger...

Timothy Dexter was businessman, but he had few business sense. He attempted to sell coal to Newcastle and bed warmers to the tropics. Yet, d...

For centuries, inventors have sought to create machines that could run forever without any external source of energy. These so-called “perpe...